Exploiting Social Software to Build Open Source Communities

This paper describes work in progress on how to build open source communities. The proposed approach is based on exploiting existing social software communities and applications to attract users and developers to the software to be released. The approach is being evaluated in the context of the NoTA platform, which is a system architecture for mobile and embedded devices developed initially at Nokia. The first results of the marketing campaign have been encouraging. Yet, a well-defined evaluation framework needs to be constructed and applied in order to measure the effectiveness of the approach.